Jane Sangerman's works on paper at the UB Anderson Gallery

by Jack Foran

Stratified

Strata: Works on Paper by Jane Sangerman is the current show at the UB Anderson Gallery.

Strata, what’s laid down. A geological process idea that transfers to an artistic process idea. In the geological context the result of sedimentation and so characterized by horizontality, and there are frequent horizontality references in the works on paper, explicitly, or implicitly if absent explicitly. Horizontality marked actually, directly, or noted by indirection.

But the principal geological/artistic reference is not to horizons produced but to their production on the planar surface, the infinitely gradual, subtle, layering of matter on matter. Varieties of sedimentation. Paint on paint, color on color, but also incorporating oddments, detritus, bits and scraps of fabric, paper mesh, window screening, providing textural variation, color variegation.

The basic medium is acrylic paint, thinned, like watercolor, in earth and pastel impure tones, color mixes that are not so much blends as suspension amalgams, on close inspection betraying their component hue elements. Or sometimes as pure tones, but varied by the layering of paint as well as non-paint materials. And just as geological processes include application and removal, deposition and erosion by a host of natural forces, wind, water, glacial scraping, scraping is a basic technique for the artworks, notably with a toothed scraper, producing meandering patterns of low-relief parallel lines in the work. Subtly, by dint of the low-relief lines as much as by the applied textural materials, the painterly becomes sculptural.

Sometimes the toothed scraper parallel line patterns crisscross, resulting in a kind of inchoate fabric pattern, echoing the fabric warp and woof of some of the laid on textural materials, the paper mesh, the metal screening. Other applied textural materials include portions of abrasion wheels, chunks of gravel-beaded roofing shingle.

What you get, what you see, is not a picture in the usual artistic sense. What you see rather is the process in the product.

Jane Sangerman is an MFA graduate of UB currently living and working as an artist and art teacher in New York City. Her exhibit continues through July 29.

Also on display at the Anderson Gallery is artist Chunwoo Nam’s exhibit of prints and related works on the theme of globalization, which has been held over until July 29.